C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Electricity

Striking the electric chain wherewith we are darkly bound.

Byron.

Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say “it lightens.”

Shakespeare.

The earth is rocking, the skies are riven—
Jove in a passion, in god-like fashion,
Is breaking the crystal urns of heaven.

Robert Buchanan.

For the poplars showed
The white of their leaves, the amber grain
Shrunk in the wind—and the lightning now
Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.

T. B. Aldrich.

Stretches, for leagues and leagues, the Wire,
A hidden path for a Child of Fire—
Over its silent spaces sent,
Swifter than Ariel ever went,
From continent to continent.

Wm. Henry Burleigh.

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.

Shakespeare.

Is it a fact—or have I dreamt it—that by means of electricity the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence; or shall we say it is itself a thought, nothing but thought, and no longer the substance which we dreamed it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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